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David Preece, the transitional head of service for estates and facilities at NUH, said: “We are doing all we can to minimise the impact on patients. This has included reducing our parking rates in 2014, providing free disabled parking in designated bays as well as providing discount schemes for frequent visitors and free parking for cancer patients and parents of children in hospital for long periods.

“We also offer the Medilink Shuttle Bus from park and ride centres and provide staff with access to generous discounted public transport schemes and encourage as many people as possible to use the tram and other ways of easily accessing our sites and our services.

Car park at Queens Medical Centre (Image: James Turner)

“Thousands of drivers visit our hospitals each day and ideally we would be able to offer free parking for staff and visitors. But safely managing and maintaining our car parks is a significant challenge and cost.

"Depending on visitor numbers some years there is a surplus and in others there is a loss in terms of the cost of running our car parks.”

Funds raised from parking and penalty charge notices are used to cover the cost of parking management at Nottingham's hospitals. Carillion manage the parking enforcement on the sites.

Some 120 NHS trusts across England were asked to give figures on parking charges and fines under the Freedom of Information Act, of which 111 responded.

A total of 40 trusts also provided data on parking fines (as opposed to charges) showing they made £947,568 in 2016 to 2017 from fining patients, visitors and staff on hospital grounds. This was up 32 percent on the £716,385 taken by the trusts the year before.

The investigation found that half of NHS trusts also charge disabled people for parking in some or all of their disabled spaces.

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"Patients who require disabled parking may have little choice but to access their care by car, and may need to do so often. Targeting them in this way feels rather cynical. The increase in parking fines is also worrying.

"Hospital appointments are often delayed or last longer than expected, so even if you pay for parking you could end up being fined if your ticket runs out."

While NHS trusts in England continue to charge patients, visitors and staff for parking, hospital parking in Scotland and Wales remains largely free.